Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the journey of both the strands – internalism as well as externalism. It provides an interrelationship between externalism and meaning holism and internalism and meaning atomism and also finds an amendment by bringing the thesis of ‘indeterminacy of meaning’ as advocated by Quine himself. The book aims to evaluate the ongoing appeals of reconciliation between self-knowledge and externalism particularly from two major standpoints – from the perspectives of Donald Davidson and Akeel Bilgrami. It attempts to follow an analytic style that offers contemplation to a critical analysis of language and theoretical clarity. The book examines primarily the post-Cartesian semantics based analytic trends introducing descriptivism and the causal theory of reference. Quine’s naturalism looks for the evidential checkpoints and believes in the tenet of intersubjectivity that escalates all observational sentences towards objectivity.